Social Responsibility
The British artist Liam Gillick recently spoke at NYU about his body of work and his practice. As a young adult he was involved in the Labor party in the U.K., and has been continually interested in that kind of political mindset. Though his work often references politics and the economy, it usually talks about it in a way that is complicated and obscured. During the question and answer segment of the talk, someone asked him how he felt about the readability of his work, and whether the people that he was talking about could actually understand it. In a manner that was refreshingly genuine, he responded that that wasn’t really a question that he knew how to answer. In a way that question is beside the point, the fact that Gillick is making work about these things in the first place should fulfill any responsibility that he should have. But I think that the biggest problem, or the reason that it becomes so complicated, is the idea of “should” and what expectations there are for the artist in society. There is a pull between making the kind of work that you want to make and this idea of Social Responsibility.
At this point my work does not overtly have to do with politics or social problems, but I think that the role of the artist is to continually question and think, which makes the artist an inherently socially active person. Showing artists have an audience that I as an art student do not, which changes the expectations for being an artist in society.
Discuss Tradition, Innovation and Originality. How do they relate to each other? How do they relate to the arts?
The idea of originality is a fundamental aspect of our understanding of the arts. Critics and art historians expect artists to be constantly pushing our understanding of art forward, and to be rearticulating what we do and don’t accept as art. We are ultra aware of tradition and art history. Contemporary artists are expected to work with art history, almost in the same way in which they would work with a medium. But at the same time, artists who repeat history are criticized. Sometimes the work that seems most original is work that is made outside of the art world, by people who don’t necessarily understand the art historical trajectory that most contemporary artists work with.
There is a difference between how artists and art historians talk about art history. Artists often read art history in a way that suits them, rather then in the way that history is generally written. This can be problematic, because in general it is good to be well informed, but also can allow artists to look at things differently. The way that history is written can be so arbitrary; the opinion of a certain critic can quickly be accepted as fact.
Art, Culture and Society: Our Contemporary Culture
I have trouble defining the place that our art culture is in right now, because it seems like there are so many different types of work being made. Work from the past century and beyond is so canonized and defined, but it seems unlikely that that’s how it felt when the work was actually being created. Both in the art school environment and in a more polished contemporary gallery environment it seems more like there are groups of four or five people making a certain type of work, rather then a larger overbearing movement. But despite what seems like diversity in materiality and content, there seems to be a kind of general disappointment with contemporary art.
This summer two different articles, one by Mira Schor and one by Jerry Saltz, came out that critiqued the younger generation of artists for being complacent and not making work that shocked the system. Soon after, a post was written on the art blog Hyperallergic that questioned where the work that Shapiro and Saltz were looking at was coming from. Both authors were talking about art that came from established institutions, i.e. grad schools and the Venice Bienniale, and Kyle Chayka proposed that if they were to look in less conventional places i.e. the internet, they might find less conventional work. Varanian talks about GIFs as something new and even if that one mode of art making doesn’t seem like a movement, I think that they might be pointing to a symbol of something greater. For me, Ryan Trecartin’s work feels like a moving, living GIF. His work has been accepted into the mainstream art world with open arms, but to me it still seems overwhelming, strange and different. The overwhelming factors of Trecartin’s work seem to mirror the way that “contemporary culture” feels right now. Which is kind of impossible to explain.
Something that seems prevalent in both art schools and in galleries is art about other art. Though in some ways this isn’t new, there is a type of glibness to some of this work that can be frustrating. The complacency is not as worrisome for me as is the cynicism that some of this work conveys. It’s not that the work is bad, or that the jokes aren’t smart, but that it seems like there might be other, more interesting things to make work about.
http://hyperallergic.com/27596/art-kids-not-alright/
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/venice-biennale-2011-6/
Art, Culture and Society: On Old and New Media
When artists work with print or digital media to make a work that exists in more then once place at a time something fundamentally changes in our perception of it as an art object. When an artist makes a zine, or a poster, or video and then puts it out into the world without a specific edition it loses it’s preciousness and stops belonging to the artist in the same way. It’s a simple gesture that makes us redefine, or at least reexamine, our understanding of how art functions.
This definition becomes more complicated when these objects get historicized and put into the context of a museum. Recently there has been a series of Fluxus shows at major institutions where posters and hand-outs are put behind glass. Since there isn’t art in the traditional sense to display, the posters take the place of the paintings. It might be a curatorial problem, rather then an idealistic one, but it seems strange to put objects made for people to interact with into a space where that is impossible. These shows felt more like displays of information then anything else.
Besides changing the aura of the art work, working with multiples allows you to access a much greater audience then you otherwise would have been able to. When free or cheap print media is probably going to be relatively localized, working with the internet allows you to hypothetically access almost anyone. Art on the internet does not have the problem of Walter Benjamin’s aura, nor can it be put behind glass. Or, at least, no one has figured out how to do that yet.
Art, Culture and Society: On Galleries and Performance
While I was half way through Lucy Lippard’s “Geography of Street Time” and had pages of essays on performance art and galleries ahead of me, I visited Tris Vonna-Michell’s exhibition at Metro Pictures in Chelsea. Though the work was not strictly performance, as no one was actually performing, recordings of the artist reading narratives played throughout the space and could be listened to at different speeds on headphones in various parts of the gallery. Though Metro Pictures is a white walled Chelsea gallery, seeing this show was a very different experience then seeing one of the many painting shows that line 24th street. This show was unique because of the originality and complexity of Vonna-Michell’s ideas, the precision of his presentation, but also maybe because of the presence, or the idea of the presence, of the artist himself.
The so-called Godmother of performance art Marina Abramovic is interested in the idea that there is a kind of aura to the performer. When you are in the audience of a performance you feel a connection with the artist that is hard to find with another medium. This connection makes performance work seem, for lack of a better word, “real” in a way that work made in other mediums does not. The performance artist is not tied to the gallery or the museum in the way that a sculpture or a painting is, which hypothetically allows the performer to take to the street. It’s harder to make a performance into a commodity then it is to make an object into one.
Thomas McEvilley writes about the gallery as a strange, sacred, enclosed space. It is not a place that everyone can access, “As a ritual place of meeting for members of that caste or group, it censors out the world of social variation, promoting a sense of the sole reality of its own point of view and, consequently, its endurance or eternal rightness.” McEvilley is right in a lot of ways, but there is also opportunity within the walls of the gallery. It is hard to imagine how an art would function without galleries and how artists would make a living. Rather then condemning the gallery as a lifeless space, maybe we can re-imagine the gallery as a space where artists can thrive.
Art, Culture and Society: What Is Public?
Where and how does the public exist? As a noun “public” is defined as ordinary people, the community at large. The language of this basic definition is relevant when put into the context of the art world. How do we create work meant to exist outside the white walls of the gallery and what, if anything, is the difference between the general public and a public that is more familiar with the vocabulary of art?
An artist friend recently said to me that her art was the only place in her life where she felt that it was okay to be selfish. The relationship of art making and the public seems tied to that idea, that art making is inherently a kind of selfish and solitary endeavor. There is a kind of guilt that comes with this instinct to create art and to dedicate the time and money that it takes to make things. It begs the question whether it is valid for a thinking, capable, educated person to dedicate their lives to something that might be inherently self-serving.
What the role of the artist is and the ways an artist can function in a social society has been re-imagined in the past fifty years. I think immediately of Joseph Beuys and the way he thought about the political implications and responsibilities of being a working artist. Besides working on projects that functioned in public space, he also taught classes where he would encourage students to over enroll with the idea that everyone who wants to learn should be able to. There seems to be a kind of optimism to this kind of understanding of public art. The idea of the artist as a teacher seems like one of the most interesting manifestations of the public art. As artists and as people we don’t have legal access to most of public space. If we think about the public as purely physical space, i.e. walls of buildings, courtyards etc. most of the space that exists is dominated by advertising or is inaccessible. We are constantly barraged by images when we are on the street and in public space, but it is rarely art.
(Source: oldchum)
